Determine Goals:
The first step to planning any addition to an organization should be setting goals. Before joining the social world, an organization should have an understanding of its goals for:
The social media team at large,
Each social platform, and
Individual team members.
“The first thing we did was to define a purpose. What is the purpose of starting a community? Over the past two years, we heard, ‘You’ve got to be in social! You’ve got to be in social!’ A lot of companies are doing that, but they don’t know why,” said Kailei Richardson, manager of strategy and social media expert at PointRoll.
Richardson commented that Ripple6, the social marketing division of PointRoll, decided to create a social presence to “use [the company's] product to show how effective it could be, but to also act as an extension of the Ripple6 website.” She noted that the website acts as a brochure of sorts for the company, but the social sites they’ve created promote real dialogue and show a bit of personality behind the organization.
Morgan Johnston, corporate communications manager who leads JetBlue’s social media strategy and execution, pointed out that planning a strategy for each social platform was key for planning the role of the social media team within JetBlue:
“For JetBlue the role of the social media team started with defining what our role as a company was within each of the various social channels where we interact with customers. Each community tends to define how they’d like to see the business interact with them. It was important to be receptive to those ideas and work collaboratively to define a role where both customers and the organization can find equal utility.
“With Twitter for instance, the real-time nature of the tool tends to lend itself to an operational focus; service monitoring and recovery… While Facebook or our blog are more focused on story-telling, sales or promotions.”
Having goals in place for the social media team, its individuals and each social platform will enable team members to define responsibilities and measure success.
